Empirasign Blog: Recent Posts

Offer Alerts

Empirasign user portfolios have long linked to both our BWIC Alerts and Daily Recaps services. We are proud to announce we have extended our Alerts service to Dealer Inventory Offerings as well.

How it works: After each upload of daily offerings, we run a matching program that searches for matches between the most recent batch of offerings and the bonds a user has stored in his or her portfolio. Whenever a match or matches are found, an email is composed and sent to your Bloomberg or corporate email address. You don't need to be logged into Empirasign to receive these alerts.

Sample Offering Alert

Get started by adding bonds to your portfolio. It's as simple as cutting and pasting a column of cusips or ISINs from Excel. Both the number of bonds you can store and the number of sub-portfolios you can set up are unbounded.

sample portfolio screenshot

Portfolios now seamlessly handle all US and EU-based structured product. i.e. ISINs are recognized as identifiers and matched by our various alerts systems.

Improved Excel Presentation

March 25, 2013

A new version our Excel downloader is now available. The core functionality remains the same, but a few pesky presentation issues have been resolved.

Prices vs Dates:12-04 is an entirely valid price for a derivative, but Excel will almost always convert this to the date 12/04/13. Based on a data extraction's header row, our downloader now pre-sets text columns to Text and number columns to General so this problem no longer occurs. Excel VBA masochists are free to read more on choosing different data types for each column when peforming a TextToColumns operation here.

Variable Column Widths: Columns widths are now AutoFit so the contents of all columns can be easily read while minimizing screen space used. Thank you Sam, whose suggestion lead to this change.

Empirasign Direct

March 14, 2013

Has the Market Data budgeting and procurement process got you down? Do you feel like you could trace early man's journey from the Rift Valley to Patagonia quicker than it takes to get a piece of software installed at work?

If so, you'll be happy to hear you can now do an end run around the bureaucracy with Empirasign direct to consumer contracting and billing. Enjoy the benefits of Empirasign without the headache of dealing with budgeting, procurement, legal and the umpteen other people who must sign off on what is effectively a minor expense.

Benefits of Direct to Consumer Billing and Contracting:

Simple contract that is immediately cancelable if your organization later signs a contract for the service.

Credit card billing--no checks to write.

Web license is $500/month.

The fees you pay to Empirasign are tax deductible as an Unreimbursed Employee Expense.

Offer Spread Changes

Feb. 27, 2013

We are proud to announce additions and enhancements to our Inventory Offering Spread Changes report. With this report, you can easily spot and put a fine point to market trends by measuring how dealers are moving their offering levels day to day.

How it works: For a given sector, we look at all the bonds offered today and all the bonds offered the previous business day. For the set of bonds offered on both days we enumerate how many are offered unchanged, wider, or tighter. The results are displayed in both graphical and tabular formats on the report.

Getting started: Navigate to the market sector report you are interested in. These reports can be found on the Navigation Bar under ListMetrics/Offering Spread Changes.

Navigation screenshot

On the report page, a chart displays spread movements over time. Below the chart is a table displaying the actual unchanged, wider, and tighter totals for each trading day. Clicking on any bar on the chart (as shown below), or any cell in the table (also shown below) will open a detailed report showing the actual bonds offered for the selected day/change type combination.

Additional sectors are coming soon. Please contact us to move your favorite sector to the top of the heap.

BWIC Email Extractor

Feb. 19, 2013

Have you ever received a BWIC aggregation or recap email that's packed so dense with information that it could make your head explode? Our enhanced Email Search tool allows you to quickly make sense of these messages and access information about bonds and BWICs embedded in them. Simply copy and paste an email or Bloomberg message into the Raw Email Message text box on our Email Search page and hit the Parse Email Msg button.

After clicking the Parse Email Msg button, your original email is overlayed with meta-data that identifies BWICs (large colored circles), and Bloomberg tickers, cusips and ISINs (small green circles). BWICs circled in green indicate that trade color is available. BWICs circled in yellow indicated that price talk is available. If no price talk or trade color is currently available, the BWIC is circled in black. To visit any BWIC page on our site simply click inside a BWIC's circled region.

You can also run a quick search on any Bloomberg ticker or cusip by simply clicking on a highlighted identifier. A pop-up will appear displaying information regarding appearances on past BWICs and inventory offer sheets. A link to the bond's complete trade history is also available to click on. Example displayed below:

Finally, you can run a bulk search on every bond in a message by clicking on the Bulk Search button. If your email contains BWICs currently not in our database (BWICs that are not circled), you can click on the Add to Index button to have them added to our database.

Trouble Shooting: The Email Search page is reliant upon both CSS for styling and JavaScript for parsing. As such, this page may not work as advertised until you refresh your browser cache by hitting CTRL-F5.